Stranger Without Candy
by elveljung
Summary: A series of experimental first meetings between the memembers of what would become Schwarz.
1. Chapter 1

**Stranger with No Candy**

The day I met Crawford I was thirteen.

My name at the time was Johan, which I did not particularly like but which mattered very little because I was in the habit of changing names every few days. Johan d'Este I called myself, and I lived in luxury on the streets of Berlin.

I was the rebellious prince of a tribe of thieves and gypsies and whores, was myself the best thief and gypsy and whore there was. My crown was a length of golden damask ripped from a drapery in an abandoned house I'd camped in once, tied over my forehead to keep my hair out of my face. The liquid-fire mane was inconveniently easily spotted when I practiced pocket picking, but whatever money it lost me and trouble it caused me there it more than made up for when I needed to be charming or prostitute myself.

Occasionally I prided myself on the fact that, should I suddenly find myself bereft of my peculiar talent, I could have made my living as a whore without the slightest trouble.

Other times I was merely happy to have it, so that I might avoid pain and starvation and other such unpleasant sensations by tapping into the mind of someone sufficiently close. It would have been oh-so-lovely to be able to give their thoughts a firmer nudge than what little I could manage before their minds merged too much with mine for me to be able to command even my own thoughts properly, but what I had was still better than nothing.

"Joseph," someone called then, a voice rather definitely different from any I had heard before. For one it pronounced the Anglo-Saxon name I'd worn last week with an accent that was confident with the word but not British – not European at all, judging by my vast experience of dialects, collected over an, albeit short, lifetime in the global capital of Germany.

I turned, searching the crowd behind me for the speaker, eyes rowing fast over their faces even as my expression and the tilt of my head spoke of practiced lazy grace. There was no doubt as to who had called; I scanned the busy men and the shopping women and the whining children, but the one staring levelly back at me from across the cobbled street was the only one who mattered. Fairly tall, short dark hair, crisp suit. He'd have looked like one of the would-be business-men who tried so hard to establish a respectable aura in daylight that they paid twice the money of a regular customer when they went to Cabaret at night, had it not been for the set of his shoulders and face, the delicately cynical twist of his left eyebrow that marked him as a man of world. I'd had ample practice recognizing it.

"Joseph Krauzer," he said, not speaking loudly, but enough so and with enough distinctiveness for the sounds to float to me.

I wasn't quite certain why I went to him – then again I wasn't even certain why I'd stopped when he first addressed me, because I forgot my aliases almost as soon as I came up with new ones, and I'd only been Joseph for two days.

People watched me as I made my way across the packed street, the shopkeepers watchfully, the women scornfully or with pity, the men with disdain or desire. All the while the stranger's gaze lay on me inscrutable. I came to a stop with more distance between us than I would normally have allowed to separate me from a man I might probably like to rob or bed or both. It was as though I considered him predator rather than prey, despite the normalcy of his style and the lack of knife-shapes beneath his clothing. I didn't like feeling skittish, but I never ran away before I had what I wanted.

"Who are you, mein Herr?" I demanded in a hot whisper, speaking English since I figured he was likely American and they liked the locals to know their language, adding the last phrase in German because foreigners seemed to find it so wonderfully kinky.

"No one you would know of," he dismissed, then added after a short moment's apparent thought, "Crawford."

"How do you know of me, mein Herr Amerikaner?"

"A little bird whispered in my ear. Well, a street rat, rather."

"And what would they have happened to whisper?" I inquired, wondering if I ought to thank or kill the tattletale. Of course, in order to do either I'd first need to know who'd spilled, and this man who called himself Crawford… his mind was closed. Strange, that. I'd have preferred to let my soul overlap with his over doing it with one of my fellow street rats, because the chance of the American being high, on alcohol or otherwise, was much slimmer, and my talent had a tendency to lose itself in stoned minds. Hence I let a tendril of thought caress the inside of Crawford's head – only to find it gliding uselessly over a flat, dark, cold surface, as though his mind was caged in beyond walls of thick dirty ice.

"Nothing suitable for a discussion on the street," he replied, smiling thinly.

Oh. They'd said I was a great fuck, then. True enough, though I wondered if that was something I wanted to try with someone whose mind I couldn't mesh with – I couldn't read him to see what he wanted, nor could I chose to indulge in his sensations of bliss and conquest in order to ignore what my own body was put through.

"I'm sorry, Herr Crawford. I have an appointment." I'd been with enough Englishmen to speak their language fluently, but my German-British accent sounded odd compared to his solid American pronunciation.

"I rather doubt it," he said and, to my utter surprise, grabbed hold of my wrist. "This won't take long. It's not your body I'm after."

"What else would you want?" I sneered, testing his grip none too subtly. It had startled me that he'd be willing to touch me like this, put a perfectly snow-white glove around the rag-reminiscent green fabric covering my arm out here in the street, but my reflexes had taken over, I'd whipped away to run. And even so he'd caught me.

That was impossible.

I was… oh, damn, forgot the name again… I was Johan d'Este, and I simply was not caught. Immune mind or not, this man should not be able to counter my speed and unpredictability, two talents nursed well on the street.

"For the moment, a bit of your time. I'll compensate you if you want."

"Got candy, stranger? Sorry, my mom told me not to take it."

"If you had been in the habit of listening to your mother, I doubt you'd be here," he said, rather coldly but with an amused tint to his expression.

Fucker.

"What the hell do you want from me?" I demanded again, not quite going so far as to trash in his grip. Yet. "No one buys time from me, what the fuck do you want? My hands? My mouth? My ass? Sorry, I'm not selling them to you. Let go now or I scream."

"I told you, I do not want your body."

"Then what the fuck –"

His eyes should have been cold and creepy and crazy, but they were just brown and nearsighted. He said, "I want your soul."

I raised my eyebrow. My soul, huh? Well, I'd never had much use for that myself, now had I?

xxxxx


	2. Chapter 2

**Stranger Without Candy**

The day I met Schuldig I was eight.

He appeared quite suddenly on the picturesque way to church. Actually, I felt he did not at all belong; the landscape around us was of the so-called heavenly variety, filled with lummy greenery and buzzing bees.

Schuldig, on the other hand, was as far from piety glories as one could possibly imagine, worldly and vulgar. He stood in front of me on the gravel-way, dressed in flashy rags and with hair the color of Judas Iscariot's falling unruly around his pinched, rat-like features.

It was the sort of face one has to grow into, that can be beautiful only when worn the right way, with no prettiness given for free. His size was that of a child my senior by no more than a year or two, but that was the only childlike quality about him – the eyes were dark beyond their sky-blue hue, the stance one I recognized from some people in town that one of the sisters had pointed out warningly, mumbling about thieves and harlots, and the face was all sharp lines, bold, bruised and starved, with full lips and hollow cheeks.

He did not look angelic, and no human could appear out of nowhere except sorcerers and witches, who had been burned from the mortal realm long since and burned in Hell for time eternal now – which meant the fey youth could only be a devil.

It was horrific to find I was not repulsed.

_Fallen angel,_ I thought, had already established that was what he had to be, but it did not seem right; he seemed not to have ever been innocent.

"What would you name me, then?" he asked, cocksure and curving his mouth into something that incorporated all the important elements of grinning and smirking both. "Guilty?"

Devil mindreader or not, his accent was thick and German. I recoiled: it was a nasty drawl he had, shrill and guttural at once, and these parts of rural Ireland were conservative enough that animosity from the great war still lingered.

"Soil not our language with your foul names."

His smile turned cheeky, showed a hint of teeth. He looked at me out of large eyes, from under thick black lashes and thin gold-red hair. "If it please you, I'll be Schuldig. Schuldig is as fine a name as I've had in some time."

"Schuldig," I repeated. It was a name thick as European sausages, tart as oranges, sweet on my palate as ripening apples.

I think that was when my faith started to dwindle.

Months later he was there again, inside the very church, during holy sermon. I was siting in line with my family, watching the priest read from the little black bible in his hand and the sisters sing behind him when out of nowhere, for the shadows from which he emerged were too slim to be hideouts, walked the creature I had named Schuldig. His mouth was a jester's, his eyes the hue of the innermost blue flame of hellfire, his hands danced snowy and graceful as angel wings.

I alone appeared to notice him as he sauntered lazily up to the altar, jumped atop it and performed a mocking bow to the oblivious preacher before abruptly giving him the finger.

I was trembling; knew not from what emotion.

He held my hand on the way home, and I was thrilled and sick from the secret knowledge that while my right hand rested in that of Sister Ruth, my left was grabbed securely in the chalky fingers of a German demon.

I had grown weak but felt strong.

Eventually he revealed the truth of the false people who called themselves my family, then soothed me when I cried their blood.

"Oh, shut up, you big sissy girl," he sneered, cradled me in stick-thin arms that smelled of ash and oil. He fitted his chin atop the crown of my head, letting my face rest against the column of his throat and in the cave of his collarbone. His hellfire hair was a protective drapery around us both as his sweet-smelling breath whispered insults in my ear.

I was brought to countless mental wards because they claimed I heard voices, but they were wrong. I only ever heard him, to the exclusion of all speakers of mortal origin.

There was never true regularity to his visits, but they were never farther between than a year or so at most. Some days he came twice or thrice.

He laughed a lot, cried sometimes, liked to curse and snark and hate, though he claimed he'd like to experience love as well. "Just to try out novel concepts, you know," he explained in one breath, only to say in the next, "It's because I'm Guilty." That was his explanation for everything.

"I was always told God loved all his children," I would reply. "I do not feel loved." Least, not by Him.

His head tilted to the side speculative, like a blackbird's. There was cruel amusement in the curve of his mouth. "I can read the minds of all living things; I've never caught a whisper of anything resembling a god."

Dying or not, my faith caught in my throat. "He is not, then? Is there a Devil? Is that whom you sold your soul to, in exchange for these strange unholy powers you play with?"

His headshake was quicker than a whore's laughter, with the same outrageous charm and shame. "Souls aren't my concern. I did sell mine, as it happens, but a mortal man gave me a better deal than Satan offered. Powers were mine already. Food and shelter I needed still." He shrugged, light and terrible. "Or maybe he is the Devil having taken human shape, walking upon God's green earth to bring us doom and judgement."

"You can see his thoughts," I spat. "Shouldn't you already know?"

Though laughing again, he was taken aback, I could tell. Gulping, wondering why the thought of his soul, provided he'd even had one to begin with, in a mortal's hands galled me immensely, I calmed.

At length, but before he could disappear from me again, I said: "You can have my soul instead, if it please you."

"I don't want it. I'm better off without a soul, without anything to tie me down or be held hostage against me." The haughty tilt to his chin was arrogance so hollow I wanted to cry for pride of him. Then he smiled, pressed a lipstick-clammy kiss to my ear, my forehead, my mouth.

Used as I had grown to his antics and unpredictability, I startled and kissed him back before kicking him a few paces back.

"What a little bitch you are," he muttered. "Jei. God, that's such a pansy-ass name. I mean, you're pretty and sort of fun, but I've got enough people beating me, thanks."

"Give me a name. A new one. One that's from you and not a god that doesn't even exist." My voice shook. Badly as voices do when not used to begging or ordering and not certain which one they're doing. I knew only that I had to say it, and now at once.

The cavalier attitude he suddenly sported, pleased as a cat with a plate of fat cream to indulge, could not hide the blazing intensity of his lazily half-lidded glance. He drawled, every word scratched raw on his sharp teeth and smooth with their own metaphorical blood: "Surely you've heard the pagan saying that he who names you is your god to follow and…" He stopped speaking but did not stop looking.

I smiled back at him, a smaller and grimmer expression than his wide and impenetrable one. "Name me and be my god to follow and love, then, if it please you. It does me."

His smile was so sweet it was a wonder liquid sugar did not dribble down his chin, and his eyes had reached molten temperature. He opened his arms to me in a parody of the painting of Christ that had adorned our little church, then – twitched, turned to sneer over his shoulder as though at someone calling him, pulling softly but inevitably at his sleeve.

He vanished with a curse and a pop and a smile that was of the heavenly variety after all.

"Farfarello," was the first thing he said when he returned, not ten minutes later and still flushed and glowing. "You're Farfarello and you're _mine_." His embrace was hard as it was hasty, his mouth described a sloppy, saliva-slick arc over mine.

Four minutes and twenty-seven seconds later he had shown me how to escape and told me to "have some fun, be a bad boy, I dunno, kill some heretics or something" until he came to pick me up.

Having severely informed him that I was perfectly able to take care of myself and did not need to be fetched like a child from kindergarten, at which claim he snorted and patted my cheek, I set about taking his advice. I killed blasphemers who had not seen the true light, worshipped the Trinity instead of the godchild I'd named Schuldig.

He came for me in a market square, found me paying for a cup of hot coffee with money I'd taken from collection in the latest church I'd massacred in. We both had rosy cheeks when he distractedly shuffled his feet and fastened a strand of hair behind his hair; I pulled off my left green mitten and took his hand. He blinked, then smiled and led me away, walking close with his head on my shoulder.

"You seem down," I eventually remarked; his endless, cheerful babble was edged with faint irritation beneath the excitement I fancied I had evoked.

"People invading my head," he grumbled. "Forcing lots of shit on me I've no desire to read or know about."

_I'll kill them_, I declared with calm conviction. I'd kill anyone who hurt or threatened what was mine or what I belonged to. Whom I belonged with.

"Sure you will," he smirked, and looked tired, and kissed me hard and deep in the middle of the sidewalk. "Fuck, I almost believe you."

Even looking about to cry he was slender and hot in my arms, and I followed him discontentedly when he disentangled to hurry away with me in reluctant tow. Amused at my mien, he tossed money at a girl inside a building, dragged me up a staircase and kicked a door close behind us, then sprawled bonelessly on a broad bed, dragging me down atop him. I wasn't right sure what to do with an exurbanite armful of redhead demon hotness, but suddenly the idea of moving from the sidewalk did not strike me as at all unappealing.

He laughed and cried and moaned and cursed and begged, called me angel and demon and _Farfarello, oh shit oh god Farfarello_. I'd found love that was a good deal more rewarding than that of the evil creature who called himself God.

In the morning we boarded a plane and I watched him sleep, sweet-looking for all that his brow was creased and that he drooled a little. We arrived in winter Berlin and met the dark man with glasses called Crawford whom Schuldig had sold his soul to. Schuldig told me it was not a bad deal, really, he'd sold his body much more often and he had more use for that himself, didn't he? He was fine.

I intended to be with him always and make sure he continued to be.

Crawford might have had his soul, but everything else was mine.

xxxxx


	3. Chapter 3

**Stranger Without Candy**

The day I met Farfarello I was fourteen.

It was funny, in the bitter, ironical, twisted sort of way that meant I'd have been gleeful if it had happened to someone else – funny that I met Farfarello only as an obstacle, an anti-climax, and yet the day of that meeting was so immensely important to me.

Then again it was only upon meeting Schuldig that I understood what meeting Crawford had meant to me, so perhaps it should not have come as a surprise that it was seeing Farfarello that drove home Schuldig's importance.

Forty qualmy minutes on the subway brought me home: Crawford had never needed tell me it was imprudent for a lone preteen boy whose lilting accent was easily remembered to attract possible unwarranted attention by hailing a cab.

Years on the streets had taught me quite well without his interference the value and the skills of discretion. I'd never been sorry I came with him that half decade ago, when he found me and offered me a place in a world whose utter disdain for me only ever almost matched my hatred for it.

Nine was the age the Rosenkreuz personal gave me when Crawford presented me to them, though smallish genes and malnutrition had made me look about six. My mind hadn't been a six-year-old's. I'd barely grown into the age they'd first attributed to me even now, which meant nothing to me. Telekinetics, after all, had even less reason than other talents to care about physical prowess, and the strength of my gift had been by far my oldest feature.

I met Crawford in Tokyo, curled up in a dirty lilac blanket. I thought for a moment he was Death, dark and pale and here to collect me.

"Naoe Nagi," he said with his strange inflection, and I contemplated running but decided my legs hurt too badly: exceptional talents might manifest with no outside cue, but without training it consumed far too much energy to be put to everyday use, and was weak, comparatively, far more of a hope than a certainty.

It enabled me to keep at bay those who called me a monster, shunned me and hunted me on account of it, but only barely and because ordinary society had long since branded them with all prey animals' instinct for flight rather than fight. It hadn't been enough to save me from slipping and tumbling down a long ice-laced stair when last I ran from their stones and fists. Yesterday, probably: it was hard to keep track of days in the snow, where only the fading and increasing of the different kinds of aching prompted by hunger and weariness and abuse marked the passage of time.

"I'm Crawford." Rather than the cliche of speaking one's name as though expecting the listener to know it, Crawford divulged his with the apparent conviction that it would be inconceivable for said listener not to remember it. The unstoppable force of his arrogance met the immovable object formed by my dazed disinterest. "It is my belief that we will reach an understanding."

Joined by the inviting smell from the food-container he carried and the beginnings of strained boredom, the unstoppable force eventually overcame the immovable object. What did I have that I cared about losing, at this point? Even if I'd had anything of value to me, would I have hesitated trading it for a bite of his food?

"I'm not a prostitute," I informed at length, tone bland but my voice shrill and scratchy, reminiscent of a kitten's mewling. No one had listened to me until I no longer had anything to say; my vocal cords were clumsy with disuse, raw with the cold.

Faint, strictly controlled amusement made his gaze briefly darker. It remained essentially wintry – frost-cold, frost-sharp. Too worn to much care to want to live, I had no fear to spare for him, but if I'd had I would doubtlessly have joined the masses in their fright of him. Not that the masses would've willingly had me.

Letting the seconds slip leisurely past, he waited as one in command of his own time for what he must consider the opportune moment before saying, "That is of exceedingly limited interest to me." The words fell into the silence as though into a pond, unexpected as all words had to be in light of the fact I'd had no expectations. "I am Oracle."

I had no idea why that simple, ridiculous claim made me rise to my feet and come with him. I did know, later, that it was at least partly due to a slight misunderstanding: in Japanese there was no difference in formulation but one had to conclude from the context which was the correct meaning, and I interpreted his last claim to be that he was _an_ oracle.

I thought of my pre-Rosenkreuz life in Japanese, of my days in Rosenkreuz in German and of my post-Rosenkreuz time in English. Funny how the mind worked.

When younger, I'd heard, it was not uncommon for Schuldig to switch between several languages when speaking a single sentence. I did know he still thought of different subjects in different tongues. Food in German, singing in Italian, sex in Russian.

That was the past, and the past mattered only in the sense that it shaped the present, in which the future in turn was shaped and harnessed. By us, if Crawford was to be believed.

I wanted him to be, because...

Embarrassingly, idiotically, unstoppably: because Schuldig wanted him to be.

Meeting Crawford had taught me to hate, to focus the mire of dark bleakness that constituted my emotions and rein them in, reign over them. They still led me, but only abstracted, were goals instead of impulses.

Now I stepped out into the snow-strewn street, something approaching grateful to be freed from the sweaty press of people before the chill hit me. It was an inland sort of cold, deeper and cleaner than the moist deceptive one of sea-surrounded Japan – my thick coat and woolen hat would keep me from freezing but not warm.

Sighing but not deigning to blow on my fingers I started towards home.

This was only the forty-seventh day of our inhabitance, but everyplace we lived was _ours: _neither Crawford nor I left many traces of ourselves, but Schuldig defined things, be they houses or people, made himself a primary part of them. He could be ignored no more than he could be forgotten. I did not think he was even aware of this, but denying it would have been a meaningless facade.

There were other things, as well, that it was childish to deny but that I persisted in repressing none the less.

Today, I could no longer avoid paying attention to the fact, our team would receive an additional member. A new bed to be made, a new mouth chewing food from our cabinets at the table.

Well, that might be more metaphorically than literary a symbolic expression: Schuldig ate breafast out or not at all, and Crawford often limited himself to a cup of coffee in his office. Wherever we happened to be, there was always an office, and it was always Crawford's. Schuldig and I had shared a bed once because there were only two rooms, only one bed, and Crawford spent the night working in his office chair.

I'd better not think too hard on that.

On how Schuldig might have kicked me away to sleep on the couch, or gone out, but had experienced one of his playful moments and hugged me into distraction while he hogged the coverlet. On how the good mood had lasted us through the entire night (when his shoulder was sharp and hard and not at all comfortable against my face and his hair sneaked into my ear, the strands tickling me as his fingers had earlier, and it would have taken a crow-bar to force me away from him) and the morning (when the smile on his sleep-pale face was more dazzling than the sunlight that had woken him, like the artificial charm of Schuldig was always brighter than nature's allure).

Things might change, now.

I knew next to nothing about this new individual, had heard of him only in snippets of conversation between my older teammates and in lyrical, sardonical tones from a redhead delusional with insomnia, insanity and/or drink. Seldom the last, since as far as I'd ever managed to puzzle out he didn't actually like drinking and did it mostly only to annoy Crawford, who detested the practice save when indulged by our enemies. Then he was quite fond of it, if the scornful twist of his lips was any indication.

And I was good at reading between the lines, after the years in Tokyo and the months with Schwartz. Crawford and Rosenkreuz had hardened me, but then there had been Schuldig and – Schwartz did not allow for weakness, but there was strength that was hard and strength that could bend and spring back.

Collecting the bits and pieces and odds and ends, I knew the newcomer was called Jei or Farfarello. I had it on fair authority that he was young and Irish and mentally unstable. I was also quite certain that he would already have arrived when I returned home.

I was right. This was not an unusual occrurence, though concerning this I would not have minded being wrong. Could think of few things I would have minded less.

Then again, if he annoyed me too much I expected I could kill him.

Crawford probably would not mind, and Schuldig would find it priceless. Probably.

If only I'd been a liar born.

Fiddling with a key in case, against odds, someone was watching, I unlocked the door with the curse that had been renamed gift five years ago and stepped inside.

Voices leaked out from the living room; following them, I cautiously walked through the hallway, not pausing to step out of the shoes but treading carefully on the carpet so the floorbeds wouldn't complain.

"Schuldig." Crawford's cool tones, heavy with disapproval and the always inherent threat of retribution.

I'd come to understand, slowly and mostly by watching Schuldig, that the threat itself was much more easily dispersed than any actual punishment. What wise man would risk damage to his own tools?

Plus, of course, Schuldig was Schuldig. He could never have been anyone's minion; Crawford had enough trouble keeping him as some sort of freelance partner. Fortunately for the American, Schuldig was bored by planning and thus fairly content to follow his lead.

Not always, though, of course not always. They had their fights, violent shows of agitation, but violent only in an emotional capacity. There were sometimes bruises, naturally, from Crawford shaking him by the shoulders or dragging him by the arm, because Crawford had never been a gentle man, but Schuldig did complain about these.

Nor did I.

After all, they were not evidence of cruelty. After a childhood of hatred and a schooling of hatred and undertaking a life mission of hatred to finally end it, what reason was there to mind marks of mere annoyance, richly deserved?

"Brad." A light tone, almost warm. "Down, Farfarello: he didn't mean anything bad." And those last words were bright, as fire.

Crawford was seated in the stuffed chair that substituted as office chair after the real one had broken, mouth thin as he adjusted his glasses. He looked a Buddha or a king granting audience, untouchable and exuding chill disapproval that hinted you were never going to be quite good enough.

No, not hinted, this time. Subtlety would not have worked on the new arrival anymore than it did on Schuldig.

Beside the redhead on the couch, all but interwoven with him, was whom I gathered was called Farfarello. Small and pallid though he was, he looked a hunting dog ready to be unleashed, held back only by Schuldig's limbs around him.

"Nagi." I'd known they knew I was there, but the way Crawford's extremely measured voice pronouncing my name called attention to me was not quite comfortable. Schuldig's face was neutral for once, shading into tired and statisfied and with the everpresent hint of bored annoyance that always cut. Crawford was not-realxed, which was as close to tense as he ever allowed himself to get.

Farfarello stared at me as a rabid wolf at prey.

Crawford continued: "Take Farfarello with you for a while. You might see about dinner in the kitchen."

He had never, in all the time I'd known him, waited for assent from me. He knew I'd form a telekenetic bubble around the Irish madman and forcibly bring him with me. Foam brewing in the corners of said madman's mouth would not have surprised me; there was a reason I'd made his invisible prison soundproof.

Schuldig looked briefly bereft, then bit at his lip and squared his shoulders. This would not be pretty.

I disposited Schuldig's pet in a corner and used my cur- my gift to move the doors of cabinet and refrigerator as I returned to the doorway of the living room. Farfarello wasn't a child and could damn well feed himself if he was hungry, and when he didn't succeed – well, a few hours of starvation hadn't kill anyone.

"He's mine," Schuldig was saying on the far side of the doorway.

"That seems indeed to be so." Crawford's tone was cool, collected, closer to displeased than to pleased though not fully either. "As Schwartz' telepath, how suspectible would you say he is to reasoning?"

"He's never going to be yours. He's mine, he listens to me, he cares about me." And the emotion ghosting Schuldig's words was too complex too be triumph, or even simple satisfaction. Nothing about Schuldig was simple, ever.

Or perhaps I was merely exceptionally stupid about him. Farfarello seemed simple enough, and he'd obviously gotten through. Not that I understood why Schuldig would ever want anything to do with that uncivilized albino bastard, but however.

Crawford said something else too low for me to hear before Schuldig called, in what sounded like fond exasperation laced with that familiar faint irritation, "Nagi, would you goddamn well get in here instead of eavsdropping? You're not a telepath, you know."

When Crawford voiced no objection I went timidly inside, seated myself carefully on the floor close to what had become Schuldig's couch.

Though I attempted to keep it intently on their conversation, I found my attention drifting.

Meeting Crawford had taught me hatred. Only when meeting Schuldig, however, had I realized this.

He'd been at Rosenkreuz still when I'd first returned to Schwartz from the school, picked by Crawford long since. For almost a year the American and I operated together in calm harmony, cold minds parallel in intent and never crossing into warmth.

We spent months in a small apartment in the posher Amsterdam suburbs where Crawford preformed his business in his office, only venturing to the kitchen and bathroom to follow the most relentless of nature's calls. I was left to wander as I pleased between the few tasks he set me, to find the food and rest and money that I drew the correct conclusion I was allowed to use as I wished from the lack of punishment when I eventually tried my luck and did.

We had settled into a pleasant routine of quiet meals and silent reading when the seventh month brought Schuldig. After that, there never really was any rest.

I was thirteen and fresh out of bed, drinking tea and working on my laptop still in my pajama. Schuldig was flashy in the pallid dawn, offensive verging on obscene in the mousy kitchen designed for Crawford's understated class and my simple outward humility. The sun was bright in his hair and I thought it had to be dyed, was confused and a moment later faintly irritated with myself, because why should I care how he looked?

There was a moment of astonishing closeness, a pain so hot-sharp it burned out before being fully registered, replaced by a lazy content warmth, and it starkly did not matter I had shields because it was far too late to use them before Schuldig had even started on my mind.

"Schuldig," I breathed, and I did not even know why. Realized dimly that Crawford had taught me hatred through the astonishing discovery there wasn't any hatred here: until this moment in the kitchen with Schuldig, hate had been simply default mood, nothing I could reflect over or differentiate from myself. I could now because I saw with blinding clarity I did not hate Schuldig.

I was five months short of fourteen, and I'd encountered something, _someone_, I did not hate.

Schuldig taught me not-hate.

"He's Schwartz," he said now, years later, speaking of Farfarello, and Crawford nodded.

Understandable, perfectly so, and I wanted to spit in someone's face, made a mental note to do it to my mirror. Farfarello was Schuldig's and that was all right because all the rest of us, Schuldig and I and Crawford himself, we all belonged to Oracle. By extension, so would Farfarello.

In the choice between belonging to Crawford or to myself, I'd have picked Crawford any day, but he was not my first choice.

Looking hard at the couch, at what I could never have, feeling soft and sick, I realized what Schuldig could have meant to me, what he taught me and gave me and took from me, what I could have wanted in this world that I might not have had to hate.

So: I wanted but couldn't have, and wasn't this familiar? and there was a world of hatred, and almost would not change that.

Almost was all I'd ever had, and almost wasn't good enough.

xxxxxxxxxx


	4. Chapter 4

**Stranger Without Candy**

The day I met Nagi I was six.

His appearance did not, initially, strike me as anything but curios: most people that age have pretend friends. Of course, usual companions had never held any grand appeal for me; rather than the everyday variety of games children engage in I had led my pretend minions to victory after spectacular victory over my pretend enemies.

The padded plastic chair in the garage made for a slightly substandard Evil Mastermind Throne, but given the rate at which I laid waste to their plans and lives, the opponent leaders never really had the time to file valid complaint.

Then, a few seconds past two o'clock US time May 21st, I spotted Nagi. I had just turned from my speculative contemplation of the selection of gardening tools, the sun warm on my back and shoulders, when I found myself faced with a boy of what seemed to be approximately my own age.

Tilting my chin so I could give him a slow inspection over the edge of my glasses, I disregarded the question of how he had suddenly and soundlessly appeared behind me in favor of the more immediate concern of his identity. I had certainly never seen him before – a little taller than I was, very cold eyes, some kind of rather conservative school uniform of a brand I did not recognize.

"Crawford," he said, the short word filled with equal measures dislike and admiration. "I'm not your plaything."

Before I could haughtily inform him I had no _playthings_, merely _pawns_ which was of course much more sophisticated, he was gone, elusive as any pretend acquaintance.

It was my very first vision. In the years that came they started appearing with a certain frequency, and consequently I began to fumble around the realization that under certain circumstances I could trigger them. When eventually I arrived at Rosenkreuz, twelve years old, I had long since mastered the fundamentals of my gift.

Furthermore, I had long since gotten to know the future teammates that would constitute Schwarz. Some fascinating/disturbing scenes (for I had yet not grown away from being embarrassed at witnessing others' private lives) clung to me long after the rest had faded from detailed recollection, been sorted away inside the archive that was my mind.

During the celebrities surrounding my eight birthday, right when my father was cutting up the cake, I witnessed the youth I had come to know as Schuldig running after the boy I'd learned to refer to as Naoe Nagi.

It was really a rather poetic scene: a thin-limbed child hurling himself through the streets of some foreign town, the elder catching up on him, long orange hair describing a gravity-defying arc.

"Nagi!" he called out, "Nagi, you little shit, would you fucking wait up!"

The chase ended as it had to, with Schuldig's hand large and white and delicate as a spider of snow around Nagi's shoulder, turning him. Apparently not so entirety adverse to being caught as he had seemed at first, Nagi did not fight the pull but rather moved with it, falling against his companion.

"Hey, heavy brat." But Schuldig's hands were steady and calm on his arms, holding him up and close. "Don't run away from me. Nagi – Nagi, look at me." Blue eyes, serious for once, met dark ones, forced Nagi's attention. "Nagi, there's no question about it. I love you."

It was the very first time I had ever seen the perfectly composed doll's face worn by Naoe Nagi crack, seen the humanity of hatred and jealousy and helpless love in the cracks.

His eyes slowly fell closed, like the mortally wounded fall on the battlefield, knowing that the end is coming, struggle done and lost. White as poison and carved stark and starved by cruelty's artist's hands, his face was a mask of pain so intense and transcendent it was impersonal, as though Nagi were merely its container, one of a thousand human faces made to express that which has no shape of its own.

"Schuldig," he said, and his voice was ugly, a raw scratched thing, scraped bloody. "False hope is worse than true despair."

Long chalky fingers ruffled brown hair. "You stupid little idiot. You're damn lucky I don't like you for your brain or I'd never speak to you again. Why the hell would I lie to you about this? I don't believe in all this True Love bullshit, you know I don't, but I damn well love you."

His hands were around Nagi's head suddenly, Nagi's arms so unsure yet so convulsive around him in return, and they were kissing, Schuldig intense and concentrated, Nagi hanging on with his face screwed up in bitter lines.

When at length they were finished, he said, and it was obvious they both recognized it for the hundred objections and questions and accusations it was: "Farfarello."

Schuldig shrugged, a nonchalant movement of his left shoulder, like a wild animal shaking water from its fur. I thought, watching it: he has lived in cities all his life and yet every likeness he has is that of an animal.

"There are people I like," he said, "there are people I love, there are people I have sex with. Sometimes they coincide. He's important to me, I'd never deny that. So are you, though, if not in the same way. Hell, even _Crawford _is family."

Eight and insulted, I foreswore all attraction I might possibly have felt for the gaudy, gorgeous teen who had made a home for himself somewhere in the back of my mind.

Nagi snorted, made a sound that could have developed into either a sob or a giggle if he hadn't strangled it, left it stillborn at the edge of his lips. "I love you," he said at length instead. "I've loved you all my life. No, don't make that face – you were what was missing all those years before I met you. And no, I don't think you're lying to me when you say you love me. Only. It's – I don't think we mean quite the same thing. I mean I love you; I mean I want to be with you, all the time, only you."

Schuldig's arm lay painful and desired like a lovebite over his shoulders.

I had long since concluded, of course, that Schuldig was a hopeless slut: other boys in their earlier teens have wet dreams about people they fancy. I had wet visions.

One of the weirdest, most intense and most violently sensual sights I had ever seen was one that came to me the very evening I was brought to Rosenkreuz. I was sitting on the expensive smooth leather of the luxurious taxi, observing the line of black car belt stretched taught over my grey blazer: the windows were toned too dark for human eyesight to penetrate them.

There, hidden, in between the woolen pores of my clothing, lay a secret in the shape of a bedchamber. It was a scene dominated completely by white – a room of indiscernible size with white walls, and in it a bed cloaked in white linen. Schuldig was the only pallet of color at all – an orange spill of warm tastelessness, skin a dusty gold-tinted hue. His companion was paler than most all corpses I had ever seen, his colorless skin and hair blending seamlessly with the bleached bedclothes.

I had never before been able to catch more than the slightest hints of the mysterious and frustrating fourth team member known by the quite melodramatic pseudonym Farfarello – a glint of white fading out through the doorway, a shadows of a golden stare dragging behind in a room he had left, the shadowlike echo of a ruined voice – and so studied him with disturbed interest.

_This_ was Schuldig liked to bed on a regular basis? A boy thin and frail as a chicken, his pallid complexion and all the scars reminding me of snow someone's trampled through with dirty boots.

Apparently Schuldig's taste in lovers was as eccentric as his preferences in clothing.

The scene played on soundlessly at first, mouths moving with soft edges, hair and bodies moving against the sheets and each other. When the first noise came Schuldig was lying on his back, Farfarello kneeling over him with his hands on the long column of Schuldig's throat. I could not quite decide whether I thought he was caressing or strangling.

Schuldig said, jester's mouth curved wide: "I fear God's voice in your head."

Farfarello stiffened, jerked. "I will suck the soul from thee."

Whether he found any spirit or not I did not venture to presume, but he definitely seemed to do his ardent best to ingest Schuldig's tongue.

Schuldig laughed and laughed, wild and senseless, as Farfarello left a stigmata of bruises on his body. "I'll fuck God," he declared, then immediately contradicted himself by dragging Farfarello down over him in a way that suggested quite clearly that Schuldig was not going to be the one doing the fucking.

"We're here," the driver said then, in a tone that implied he was annoyed at having to repeat himself but was used to precognitives and knew better than to openly admit to any irritation.

I nodded and left the car, taking in the grand complex of old German architecture, and promptly suffered the awfully ridiculous thought that it looked quite a lot like the Notre-Dame as depictured by the Disney movie.

xxxxx

**A/N: **This part is dedicated to my aforementioned Fair Ladylove, as the scene between Schuldig and Nagi traces its roots to a crackpot Messenger chat between us. That said, "Stranger" is now done, but look forward to "For Life and a Living", a considerably more epic Schwarz saga that we'll be co-writing. Enjoy (well, hopefully). Also, appreciation to everyone who's read and commented. Muchly so.


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